MIT alumni and current students line up on Sunday at the MIT Club of Boston (MIT COB) barbecue to grab food off the grill prepared by MIT COB volunteers. Over 300 people attended, and nearly 70 people volunteered for the annual event held in the courtyard of the Sidney-Pacific Graduate Residence.

Aaron H. Swartz is an accomplished 24-year-old by anyone’s standards. He co-authored the now widely-used RSS 1.0 specification at age 14, was one of three owners of the massively popular social news site Reddit, and recently completed a fellowship at the Harvard Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption.

The latest battle over human embryonic stem cell research is over, and the National Institutes of Health has won — the research can continue. The war can still go on with appeals, potentially as high as the Supreme Court, but researchers are unlikely to face court-ordered prohibitions on research as that multi-year process continues.

A range of generations of the MIT community gathered at Sidney-Pacific for the annual barbecue of the MIT Club of Boston this past Sunday. Alumni, their children, current students, and incoming freshmen mingled amid food and activities under the hot summer sun. The club sponsored the event for prefrosh and MIT affiliates in the greater Boston area, providing activities for children as well as opportunities for alumni to reconnect with each other and to meet current students.

The MIT Mobile App service, available for the iOS and Android platforms as well as the most recent feature phones, has a new widget for the MIT Department of Facilities. The new Building Services tool allows users to easily report on-campus maintenance issues, such as problems with leaks, lighting, and locks. The widget can mark the problem site by detecting a user’s current location using GPS, or the user can select a building or area from a list. The user also has the option to upload a photo of the problem. The widget takes those data and submits a work order to the Department of Facilities. The new widget “allows our customers to report things as they see them,” said Ruth T. Davis, manager of communications for the Department of Facilities.